It used to be that if you needed to capture your screen — be it movies or static images — Snapz Pro X was the only option worth considering. But the screen capture field is a competitive one these days, with the likes of ScreenFlow and Camtasia raising the bar on the video side while LittleSnapper and its many alternatives doing the same for screenshots.
Does Ambrosia’s star utility still shine brightest? Let’s take a look.
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Point-and-click adventure games pretty much come in two varieties: comedy or serious. There are exceptions of course, like The Longest Journey or Police Quest, but the two seldom mix. You either laugh your way through absurdity and silliness or puzzle out a story of mystery and intrigue where the only irony on show is of the dramatic variety.
A New Beginning – The Final Cut falls squarely into the latter camp. It has a few laughs and some clever witticisms, but its core plot points, characters, and underlying themes are deadly serious — concerned as they are with the very ground on which we walk. If you can see beyond some rough touches and needless melodrama, it convincingly portrays a world with a bleak future — our own — that needs radical action to save its inhabitants from devastating climate change. It’s a journey worth taking, but you’ll need a lot of patience to reach the end.
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Outer space is big. From our vantage point, it’s mostly just dots in the sky that we see at night. But there are billions of stars, asteroids, comets, and planets out there. You can see of them when you look up on a clear night, more if you use a telescope, and more still if you use SkySafari, an app that shows 46,000 stars and many of the best-known galaxies and nebulae with images from NASA and other expert star-gazers.
SkySafari isn’t the prettiest app around, but it more than makes up for it with the majesty of the stars and reams of encyclopedic information. It’s deep enough that serious astronomers can use it as a reference tool, and suitable for the rest of us to explore and learn about outer space.
“This is proof of extra-Tennesseean life,” says Rochard’s main character John Rochard, Skyrig employee number 90210, after learning that aliens do indeed exist. His wise-cracks are a special highlight of what at first seems a fairly generic — if well-executed and humorous — side-scrolling shooter/platformer-hybrid game, which soon bends you to its will. Rochard doesn’t take itself too seriously; it’s silly from start to finish, making no attempt to dress its ridiculous plot in fancy clothes, and this filters through to the light-hearted, entertaining action set-pieces.
We’ve got free download codes to giveaway to two lucky readers. Check out the review, then see how you could win.
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Changing the size or file type of your photos and other images should be a snap, but unless you’re comfortable on the command-line there’s no quick and easy built-in method in OS X. There’s many ways to resize pictures and save them in other formats — even Preview can handle that — but it takes several steps for each image.
Snap Converter fills the void. It’s a drag-and-drop image converter that can handle many file formats, resize images, add watermarks, and batch rename. Both simple and functional, it’ll handle all your basic image processing, but you may need to look elsewhere if you need more advanced tools. Let’s take it for a spin.
Sometimes it’s good to know what’s going on beneath the hood of your Mac. Keeping track of memory and processor usage helps you manage open apps and current tasks, ensuring that your computer never grinds to a halt because you’re doing too much at once.
iStat Menus is one of the more popular apps to help you keep tabs on your Mac, with its advanced monitoring of memory usage, processor usage, network bandwidth, hardware temperatures, and much more. It just got a major new version upgrade, with a slew of new features — including history graphs, calendar events, and an improved interface — so we thought we’d take a look to see how this new release stands up.
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We’re focusing on apps to help you with writing this month, and software art practice Dark Heartfelt Software makes some of the best. They’ve already had great success with minimalist writing apps Grandview and Launchwrite, which force you to focus on the current word and sentence rather than the entire document. Now they’ve released a new app, Notesdeck, which allows you to edit and consolidate notes across four different cloud services and between your Mac and iOS devices.
We got the chance to interview the man behind Dark Heartfelt, Michael Petruzzo, about his apps and design process. Read on to hear about Notesdeck, software design as art, App Store frustrations, and more.
The best and worst thing about Gmail is that it’s web-based. Keeping a browser tab open for it is both convenient and annoying. You can set it up with your desktop mail client of choice, of course, but that comes with its own baggage and issues. I like the idea of something in between the two — an app that I can install on my computer that isn’t overloaded with features I don’t use and segregated from my web browsing. MailPop Pro is just the ticket.
It lives in your menubar, is instantly accessible at all times, and improves upon the Gmail web app in a multitude of ways (with one big caveat). Let’s dive in. (more…)
I rely on RSS feeds as my main source of news and interesting stories on the Internet. But I don’t have time to go through every single story blurb to see what I’d like to read in full. I know I’m not alone in my awful noise to reading time ratio. The developers of Cream, a new lightweight RSS reader, seem to get this, and so they baked a recommendation engine right into their app.
Cream sports a modern, clean interface and design, but I’m not sure that it’s quite ready for the prime time. Let’s explore what it does well, and where it falls short. (more…)
Sometimes an app comes along that just wows you with what it does. It makes something incredibly difficult seem effortlessly simple, and you wonder why nobody had done the same thing before — or if they had, why you didn’t already know about it. Sweetie is one of those apps. It’s more a toy than a full-fledged image processing app, but boy does it impress.
Sweetie turns your photos — and any other images you choose — into beautiful ASCII art. The results are spectacular, and I’ve never enjoyed testing an app for review as much as I did here. The interface has some serious issues, which will need to be rectified before Sweetie can really shine, but that shouldn’t stop you from picking it up. (more…)
